WHAT'S FOLLOWING THE ISS? Sky watchers are reporting a "mysterious satellite" following the International Space Station. It trails the ISS by about one minute, relatively faint, but definitely there. Mystery solved: The follower is Progress 33, a Russian supply ship. On July 12th, it will come within meters of the space station to test a new automated docking system. Check the Simple Satellite Tracker for flyby times--and get two spaceships for the price of one.

RESURGENT SUNSPOT: Yesterday, sunspot 1024 took the day off; the fast-growing active region stopped growing and even decayed a little. Today, the sunspot is growing again: movie. It now measures 125,000 km from end to end, almost as wide as the planet Jupiter. Fulvio Mete sends this picture from his backyard observatory in Rome, Italy:

The size of the spot makes it a fine target for amateur solar telescopes. And it is worth watching. Sunspot 1024 is the first big sunspot of new Solar Cycle 24, and it is crackling with minor but photogenic B-class flares. By itself, this one active region won't bring an end to the deepest solar minimum in a century, but it does show that the sun's magnetic dynamo is still working--a fact some had begun to doubt. More sunspots are coming, so stay tuned.

BLUE MOON OVER IRAN: A severe dust storm so large that it is visible from space is blowing across Iran. Government officials have closed schools, cancelled flights, and warned the elderly and children to stay indoors. The only good thing about the storm is that it is turning the Moon a pleasing shade of blue:

Amir H. Abolfath took the picture from Tehran on July 7th. "I thought blue moons were a myth," he says, "but there it was."

Yes, blue moons are real. They appear when the air is filled with fine particles of dust (or other aerosols) about 1 micron in diameter. This is just the right size to make dusty air act as a blue color filter. Because the dust storm is so large, blue moons could be a regular fixture in the Persian sky for some nights to come.

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.